Our own education is often the biggest obstacle to understanding what the future may hold

We are currently running a series of workshops through out Europe for IT suppliers on business value. In these sessions we present customer evidence that business value is in the relationship that clients maintain with their suppliers rather than in any one product or company. We suggest that the process of value creation isn’t the set of linear activities they may have learned in school but a set of relationships that focus on the quality of interactions in client stories. We propose for discussion a series of postcards and anecdotes to contest an almost universal practice of selling features as solutions.

Learning about business value often begins by dismissing a number of fundamental truths that we’ve been taught.

Although the roots of scientific management have been traced back to antiquity, the omnipresence of scientific management is a fairly recent phenomenon. Based on the observations of Frederik Taylor, this vision of management is based on a general principal that the workmen who are best suited to actually doing their work are incapable of fully understanding the production process without the guidance of those who are working over them. In sum, improving work practice requires a clear and precise division of responsibility between the echelons of management. The workplace can be compared to any “mechanical art”, it can be divided into a series of activities and tasks that can be isolated, tested empirically, and improved.  Hence the concept of the “science” of management…

This mechanistic approach to management has extended beyond the private sector into the heart of higher education itself. The recent push to democratise the university has pushed many institutional sponsors to revise the underlying model of higher education. Improvement has taken many pages from the Taylor’s work on the practice of scientific management. Many institutions have added “practical” courses to their curriculum to try to meet perceived corporate needs and objectives.  Program accreditation and certification have become goals in themselves; course syllabus and content have been given by consequence more emphasis discussion and class outputs. As a result, standard and reusable “courses” have become the building blocks of higher education; the university experience itself is often more of a marketing argument than a pedagogical tool.

The potential danger of this vision of higher education isn’t in that universities that have tried to mimic private enterprise, but rather that they are focusing increasing effort in formalizing one view of management education. Work has been reduced, intellectually and in practical terms, to linear physical processes of structured activities and tasks. Improving the process of work, both in school and out, has been translated into improving efficiency: quicker and cheaper is surely better. Best practice has become the framework for comparing experience: students are encouraged to “learn” the “tools” of the trade. It is of little wonder why distance learning and virtual campuses have captured the attention of many university sponsors and administration: traditional approaches to e-learning focus on information dissemination, use less physical resources, and reduce variable costs.

Unfortunately, learning’s value proposition, at the very least in management education, may lie elsewhere. Our client interviews, be it with mangers, directors of human resources or the heads of corporate universities have hinted at a very different agenda for executive development. One of the primary goals of executive development appears to be to enrich the conversation between executives and their professional networks. Creativity is high on the list of learner priorities, and is often defined as “out of the box” rather than “canned” responses to solving client problems.  Non-linear thinking is often mentioned as the capacity of drawing anecdotes and analogies, rather than empirical facts, from prior experience. The qualities of leadership, adapted to business environments “intermediated” by technology, seem more important than ever.

These suggestions for corporation development don’t seem far from the expert opinions on the “future of learning” offered by the evening panel at Online educa. Wayne Hodges spoke of a foreseeable future for infinite personalisation of content and delivery of learning objects. Mark Johnstone insisted on the levers of facilitation and interactivity in enriching the learning experience. Stephen Heppel focused on the social aspects of learning, and need to foster annotation, creativity and proximity. All seemed to agree that the only value of technology lies in its appropriation by the user community to embed learning in the way we work.

The current gap between client needs and institutional responses in not just a question of marketing or of technology. The gap may well reveal the limits of the scientific management of the social communities in which we learn to live and to work. These limits can not be successfully addressed until we refocus the value proposition of management education on what we need to learn to build value into our teams, our clients and our careers. Changing the features and functions of learning technologies may of little help until we accept to question the premises of what this technology has been designed to do. Our own education may be biggest obstacle to understanding what the future might hold.

The German dictum offered in our business value workshops may well sum up the challenge that lies ahead: ”Wenn Sie das machen was Sie immer gemacht haben, bekommen Sie das was Sie immer bekommen haben.”

This contribution will be last posted before the Christmas break. With best wishes to all for the holidays - we'll be back with more thoughts on learning about business value early next year.

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